Book Writing Question

A very long time ago, a writer friend of mine . . . stopped writing. She'd been a columnist for The Roanoke Times for a very long time, but she wanted to write novels.

She was an excellent writer, and I'd taken a few non-credit classes from her. She was also a cousin, many times removed, but a cousin, nevertheless. I admired her work for the newspaper. I admired her spirit, and her ability to be who she was.

But, she confided to me, she could not write a novel that she thought would sell. She wrote five novels, none of them published. She blamed Hollins College, now Hollins University, the place where we both went to college, she graduating in 1973, me in 1993. Twenty years apart, though we were only 12 years apart in age.

The college had, she decided, beat the writing out of her with the professors' proclamations that one must write literary for it to count. Writing something like, say, a Nancy Drew book wasn't writing. Writing something like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was writing. Everything else was banal, unworthy, and unwelcome. They were still teaching that message, more or less, when I graduated college there, too, so many years later.

But the college has produced its fair share of good, if not great writers. Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Dillard, Margaret Wise Brown, and so many more. These authors are listed on the university website. But someone like me, who has published thousands of articles, is not listed there. Nor is my friend who wrote for The Roanoke Times.

So having tried, and in her mind, failing, my friend quit writing. "The world doesn't need another book," she told me, and turned her creativity to making handbags and other sewing and needlework projects.

Yet when she passed away unexpectedly several years ago, her husband noted her writing in her obituary, stating that she had written five novels. He did not mention that they were unpublished. Only that she had indeed made this accomplishment.

And it is an accomplishment, even if the novels only saw the inside the inside of a drawer.

I spoke about this memory to my friend's sister-in-law last year, a woman also a close and much-loved friend, but not a writer. She told me she agreed that the world did not need another book. It did not need, nor want, my book, she said, only months before she too passed away.

Was she trying to comfort me for my own frustration at failed efforts to put forth words that seem to stop where my head and heart cannot find common ground? Was she making a dig at me for even trying? Or simply agreeing with her sister-in-law as we discussed a memory I'd dredged up from the deep well of my mind as we tried to come to terms, her with dying, me with the knowledge that she would soon be gone?

My husband, upon learning of this conversation, said my friend was not really a friend if she told me that. It was not a supportive thing to say, he said. I remain undecided. She was ill, after all. And she was basically agreeing with someone she, too, had admired.

However, I find it a good question. Does the world need another book, when one can go to Amazon to see the world drowning in books, books that will never be read or studied, a book that may or may not make whoever wrote it even $1,000, if anything at all? Books given away for free for publicity's sake, books selling for 99 cents, books that someone spent 10 years writing only to see it on the remainder rack at the Green Valley Book Fair, if it makes it into a hard copy at all?

Does that time spent writing a book matter? Is it worth it? Who determines the value? Who determines the need?

How the hell does anyone answer such questions, especially when they become bound up with the images of dead people I loved?